Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Post-Contemporary Interventions) [Paperback]

Caren Kaplan (Author)

Book Description

Series: Post-Contemporary Interventions | Publication Date: August 21, 1996

Contemporary theory is replete with metaphors of travel—displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and tourism to name a few. In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan explores the various metaphoric uses of travel and displacement in literary and feminist theory, traces the political implications of this “traveling theory,” and shows how various discourses of displacement link, rather than separate, modernism and postmodernism.
Addressing a wide range of writers, including Paul Fussell, Edward Said, James Clifford, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, Chandra Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, Kaplan demonstrates that symbols and metaphors of travel are used in ways that obscure key differences of power between nationalities, classes, races, and genders. Neither rejecting nor dismissing the powerful testimony of individual experiences of modern exile or displacement, Kaplan asks how mystified metaphors of travel might be avoided. With a focus on theory’s colonial discourses, she reveals how these metaphors continue to operate in the seemingly liberatory critical zones of poststructuralism and feminist theory. The book concludes with a critique of the politics of location as a form of essentialist identity politics and calls for new feminist geographies of place and displacement.
An important and timely intervention into contemporary theoretical debates, Questions of Travel will be of interest to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including literary criticism, cultural studies, feminist theory, colonial and postcolonial studies, geography, anthropology, and sociology.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Questions of Travel is a multilayered inquiry into the ideological function of metaphors in discourses of displacement. Kaplan richly historicizes these metaphors in order to explicate the situated meanings that inhere in the myriad kinds of displacement that characterizes contemporary writing and lives. Her meditations on the rhetorics of displacement—including nomadism, exile, migrancy, and other practices of movement across space—take the reader on an exciting excursion into the fraught politics of travel discourse.”—Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

About the Author

Caren Kaplan is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She is coeditor (with Inderpal Grewal) of Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices and Between Woman and Nation (with Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem).

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (August 21, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822318210
• ISBN-13: 978-0822318217
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #897,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Travel and Its Metaphors, March 31, 2000

By 

Bianca Freire-Medeiros (Miami, Florida (USA)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Hardcover)

Following the path set by James Clifford, who long ago proposed a much-needed bridge between anthropological, literary and historical approaches to the topic of travel culture, Kaplan analyzes the various metaphoric uses of travel in feminist and poststructuralist criticisms. Displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, tourism and so on: Kaplan aims to investigate the role played by these symbols and metaphors in contemporary literary and cultural theory in Europe and the United States, linking them to the history of production of colonial discourses. Her main argument is that these metaphors of travel contribute to the blurring of fundamental differences and disputes between national identities, classes, races and genders. In each chapter, a particular binary formation (e.g., exile/tourism) or charged metaphor (e.g., nomad) is examined in order to highlight the possibilities and limitations of these terms as they appear in Euro-American theory. "Without rejecting or dismissing the powerful testimony of personal and individual experiences of displacement", she asks, "how is it possible to avoid ahistorical universalization and the mystification of social relations that Euro-American discourses of displacements often deploy?" (p. 2-3). In other words, it is necessary to investigate which material forces allow a social and collective phenomenon such as the modern experience of mass-movement, voluntary or forced, to be so often represented as an individualized experience. But Kaplan, as she herself acknowledges, is more concerned with the movement of ideas and practices rather than with movements of bodies through specific places. The lack of empirical references, I suspect, many times leads her to be imprisoned by the same rhetorical conventions she proposes to criticize.

7 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars No comments, September 28, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Paperback)

Really a huge mistake by buying this book... Just a miscellaneous of several authors, and some of them, she just really doesn't know at all... really desappointed... mutiples attacks but no arguments.

The question that remains:
What is the matter with Cultural Studies?

9 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The decline of the western thought, July 18, 2000

By 

Nikos (Athens, Greece) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Paperback)

I frankly nothing learned from this feminist postmodernist approach of displacements and travels. If you want my opinion as a social anthropologist all this postmodern buhaha combining feminist studies, postcolonialism and post structuralism ( baptised as cultural studies) mark the decline or the impossibility of our western culture to approach the Otherness or the Difference. Culturalists such as Carmen Kaplan who seldom move from their safe arm-chair are harming ethnological studies much more than Frazer did a century ago from his Victorian arm-chair in Oxford. If Frazer had as an excuse his classisist background I should like to ask Ms Kaplan what her background could be. Something of all and nothing at all. I bet that she does not even conceive the etymology of her name. Academia and the layman are not greatly beneficiated by this sort of pseudo social science books. I admit loosing four hours of my life trying to collect a valuable information from this book but I did not succeed. In conclusion : PURE TRUSH. Why on earth uneducated western people who never dared to visit remoted populations practicing original popular culture, write this sort of books addressed to a western public if they cannot communicate even for un hour with original patterns of culture. The symptom of this alienation is not hazardous : The most one is baptised in our western culture the less one can see "beyond the lines" of the different cultures. Tomorrow I will burn this trash in my fireplace !